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Notes -
More on Trump's tariffs.
I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.
For all intents and purposes, yes. This (among other things) is what i voted for.
Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).
This allows the Democrat to maintain a smug confidence in thier own intellectual and class superiority through convincing themselves that the working class only opposes immigration because they are a bunch of ignorant racist hicks who do not understand the nuances of economic theory, and have been "tricked" by men like Trump into voting against thier own interests, rather than people with legitimate grievences and concerns, who don't like seeing thier wages under-cut and culture denigrated.
I also agree that the moral judgment towards willingness to work and "going without" is one of the core ideological differences between the Tea-Party/MAGA right and other political factions within the US.
These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.
Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.
It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.
Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.
It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?
Don't be facetious. The proportion of money redistributed via welfare which goes to administration of that welfare is pretty low, and that mostly consists of ordinary administrative workers not high-level policy wonks.
Lol. To the extent that 'learn to code' was ever a real policy, which it never really was, the vast vast majority of the funding changes downstream of that discourse didn't go to non-profits. In any case what I meant by redistribution was, well, redistribution.
Lazy and trite. There are problems with left-wing non-profits, especially in the post-Floyd period, but that has nothing to do with genuine government redistributive programmes which do a lot of good and have relatively low overheads.
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To my knowledge, the primary means of redistribution in the US is the EITC which does it on the basis of income. That doesn't seem very objectionable to me.
The primary means of redistribution is Social Security, which does it on the basis of age.
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